PLUHM - L’Anticristo o l’accettazione del male

After a series of consistently convincing albums, each built around a single theme explored and reshaped through different sonic textures, Lucio Leonardi takes his Pluhm project into the lowest possible vortex of suffering and pain, managing to elevate his music to levels it had never reached before. We've moved from the theme of absence ("On Absence") to a reflection on the past ("Songs of Darkness and Light"), to the loss of the self with "The Fall (The Last Song)", right up to today's "L'Anticristo o l'accettazione del male", an extremely powerful and evocative title that tackles (to quote the author himself) "a difficult subject, speaking of the violence that exists within each of us, and of how we make it seem normal by accepting and justifying it".

The sound of the Pluhm project grows even darker, but above all it discovers a magnificent use of trumpet, sax and piano that it had never had before, drawing inspiration from the dark-jazz sounds of bands like Dale Cooper Quartet & the Dictaphones, The Lovecraft Sextet or The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, and probably from South African composer Trevor Jones's score for Alan Parker's film "Angel Heart" (a forgotten cult classic).

The eighteen minutes of the title track are without doubt the highest point Lucio Leonardi has ever conceived, with a slow introduction of synths and background noise, shifting notes leading into the first electronic flecks, barely perceptible at first and then increasingly invasive, until the seventh minute, when the trumpet played by Luigi Giannattasio enters and pulls the track into a completely different world. What follows is an extremely slow crescendo that, without ever speeding up, digs bare-handed right down to the bottom of the subject at hand: the acceptance of evil and the realization that within us and within our society lies a black hole that is truly frightening. The synths swell into rivers in flood, the trumpet grows ever more aggressive, until a piano enters to dictate slow tempos within an increasingly swirling sonic magma. These days, it's not easy to find eighteen minutes this incisive in the ambient scene.

"Rumori di un cuore malato" has a long opening passage in dark-ambient territory, with a drone simulating the repetitiveness of a heartbeat. Everything changes with a single synth note and the long trumpet coda that follows. While sharing certain traits, the third long track (fourteen minutes), "Essere nulla, sentirsi nulla", once again in dark-jazz territory (this time with sax played by Guido Tabone), makes use of the piano in a way never heard before on a Pluhm record, with a river of notes carving into the dark whirlpool of synth and sax.

Probably Lucio Leonardi's coming-of-age album, perhaps born out of a difficult period, the kind that can make a musician's soul grow. Or perhaps not. Either way, it's a work to be listened to with care and devotion.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

15/04/2025